The Books Briefing: The Finest Books for the Olympics

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This week, I’ve been participating in a high-stakes spherical of planning. The flurry of textual content messages lighting up my cellphone will dictate how my subsequent two weeks will go, and my window for solidifying the logistics is closing swiftly. I’m speaking, after all, concerning the plans my buddies and I are making for watching the Olympics at native bars: what occasions we’ll prioritize, which patios have the perfect TVs, and who’s free throughout key moments in Paris. (I’m partial, as I advised one pal, to “gymnastics, swimming, girls’s soccer, and horses.”)

However first, listed below are three new tales from The Atlantic’s books part:

The Olympics can fire up sports activities fandom within the least jock-inclined on the market by taking part in on a heady mixture of patriotism, awe, drama, and spectacle. As Amanda Parrish Morgan wrote this week, “Athleticism, train, and sports activities all lend themselves to heightened narrative stakes.” Fortunately for the bookworms amongst us, she provides, “writers know this nicely.” Her checklist of books that can encourage you to maneuver is helpful all 12 months, nevertheless. Alex Hutchinson’s Endure explores the evergreen query of decide—and attain—our bodily limits; Julie Otsuka’s novel The Swimmers is a philosophical meditation on how water frees and transforms a gaggle of people who find themselves definitely not prime rivals. In 2022, Carey Baraka additionally wrote a few completely different set of books sports activities followers ought to learn: Romesh Gunesekera’s novel The Match actually narrates a high-stakes recreation—on this case, a pivotal cricket bout—and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is a chronicle of the fun and heartbreak of being a fan.

However there are additionally books that make nice companions to the Video games themselves. Sophia Stewart not too long ago wrote about Vicki Valosik’s new historical past of creative swimming, Swimming Fairly; this summer time, the U.S. artistic-swimming crew will compete within the Olympics for the primary time in 16 years. Rita Bullwinkel’s novel, Headshot, follows a gaggle of underdog girls boxers—and the story “makes us into followers” of the scrappy rivals, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan writes. Readers can all the time decide up apparent selections too—one thing like The Boys within the Boat, concerning the gold-medal-winning U.S. males’s rowing crew on the 1936 Berlin Video games. And right now, Michael Waters has collected an inventory of books that can deepen our understanding of the Video games themselves. I feel I’ll have some Olympic nonfiction in my bag as I cheer for america and Norway (a serious perk of being from a dual-nationality household), however balancing heavy historical past with pure enjoyable is necessary too. A pal of mine is studying Meryl Wilsner’s frothy soccer romance novel Cleat Cute, and I could must borrow it when she’s accomplished.

Eight Books That Will Encourage You to Transfer Your Physique

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

Athleticism, train, and sports activities all lend themselves to heightened narrative stakes, and writers know this nicely.

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What to Learn

So Many Olympic Exertions, by Anelise Chen

Athena is in her eighth 12 months of an American Research Ph.D. program, struggling to finish her dissertation. After she hears that her ex-boyfriend has died by suicide, simply getting by means of the day turns into an act of endurance. Which is becoming, as a result of Athena’s dissertation is about sports activities, and abruptly she will be able to’t cease watching movies of marathon runners crossing end strains in nice agony. Written in propulsive segments that transfer seamlessly between fiction and nonfiction, the novel reads partially like an interesting hybrid essay on the psychological impression of competitors and the ubiquity of sports activities metaphors, which Chen factors as much as illustrate how a lot the mentality of by no means quitting, of successful in any respect prices, has seeped into our society’s obsession with achievement. By the tip, forcing ourselves to complete issues simply to complete them turns into absurd—an invite to reevaluate for these toiling on seemingly infinite initiatives. “If Sisyphus have been an athlete, he would have been the perfect,” Chen writes wryly, “the universe’s one standout stone-roller.”  — Chelsea Leu

From our checklist: Eight books to learn when you’re in a inventive stoop

Out Subsequent Week

📚 Somebody Like Us, by Dinaw Mengestu

Your Weekend Learn

When Good Ache Turns Into Unhealthy Ache

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

In the course of the years I used to be dreaming of martyrdom, the long run nationwide champion Lauren Fleshman was a high-school athlete as nicely, on her technique to turning into some of the completed American distance runners in historical past. I knew her identify from problems with Race Outcomes Weekly, and I appreciated her due to her real smile and uncovered freckles. I additionally appreciated that her legs seemed robust and her cheeks full—traits we shared … In 1996, Fleshman and I each watched 18-year-old Kerri Strug land her gold-medal-clinching vault on her already badly sprained ankle on the Atlanta Olympics, and we noticed her coach carry her, childlike and unable to stroll, away. For an athlete, this form of ache, as Fleshman writes in her new memoir, Good for a Lady, was merely “what it took to be beloved.”

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